Breaking Into Startups

Gary Vaynerchuk does not need an introduction. For those of you who haven’t heard of him yet, he is not only a rockstar entrepreneur, he's an author and a speaker. He's a four-time New York Times bestseller. He now runs a 800-person media agency, VaynerMedia. He is also an early investor in Twitter, Snapchat, and Uber. Big on giving back and making people happy, the one legacy he wants to leave is that he has given more than what he has taken.

A San Jose-native, Heather Swan is the Chief Happiness Officer at Zoom, a video conferencing tool that works on any device. She started as an employee #15 and now Zoom has grown to over 700,000 clients worldwide, she has worked in every sales role within the company and has consistently hit her quotas. Heather has previous experience in the retail sales space, particularly for Tory Burch shoes and medical devices. Today, she shares the perspective of founding a startup from an employee perspective and some qualities a great salesperson must have.

Southern Californian-native, Ian Harriman is a rockstar salesperson. He started as a sales development representative until he rose up to the ranks of being a mid-market account executive at Checkr, a background check community that utilizes software (instead of people) to complete a majority of the parts to the process. Ian also talks about his leadership role in the Bounce Back to Work Program at Checkr, where they help both applicants and companies through their background screening process. We talk about how most companies fail, his experience at a failing company, and how he actually bounced back to where he is now.

Today, we take a closer dive into getting internships and how you can leverage those to get full-time offers. Kyle Woumn is a fullstack engineer on the messaging experience team at Twilio, a cloud-communication platform that integrates communication into apps. A Georgia Institute of Technology graduate, Kyle did internships at GE and Twilio. He's also part of the National Society of Black Engineers and he is currently building an app that fosters an online community for Black Greeks.

Born in Germany, Marco Morawec is the co-founder of The Firehose Project, an online coding school that helped over a thousand people learn how to code remotely and become engineers. They also got a 1-million dollar grant from TechHire to help more people from under-represented groups to gain tech skills. Marco got his undergraduate degree and Master's in Public Policy and Management from the University of Constanz in Germany. He formerly worked as a Product Manager at an advertising firm called Jana. A self-taught software engineer who is big on networking, Marco believes people should not be coding in isolation. Listen in as he talks more about their programs and how people can learn how to code no matter who you are, or where you are.

Jon Deng is a mentor who has helped several people break into tech. He is widely known as a software engineer at Snap Inc. Prior to tech, he was actually a platoon leader in the U.S. Army with 40 men reporting to him. He was a captain and a field artillery officer. In this episode, Jon walks us through his transition from the military into tech, his thought process, and how he essentially prepared himself for the coding bootcamp at Hack Reactor. He also talks about how he got through his job search as a veteran with zero work experience in coding as well as some resources available out there for veterans who might be interested in jumping into the tech.

Dan Burrill is not just the inside sales boss at Twilio but he's also a seasoned executive having spent time with other amazing companies including Box and Honeywell. A man who’s big on commitment and the power of listening, Dan admits coming to Twilio for one big reason - market opportunity. Twilio operates in the telecommunications industry that has been around for decades and it's fast-forwarding the space into the future. No wonder it’s his favorite among all the companies he’s worked at.

Adam is a co-founder of MissionU where he is building a school for the 21st century. He is also a founder of Pencils of Promise that has built over 400 schools around the world and provided over 70k kids with an opportunity to learn! At MissionU, Adam is building a school for the 21st century! Millions of people are either themselves effected by college debt or know someone in their family who is effected by it. College loans are also the only kind of debt you cannot default on. To fix that, Adam and his team want to give you a world class education, debt free. When he first started, Adam went on a listening tour. He spoke to over 200 people, including students, educators and CEOs of publicly traded education companies to figure out how to solve the problem. As the result, MissionU partnered with companies like Spotify, Uber, Lyft, Warby Parker and many others to understand which base, skill-sets, a student must have in order for these companies to hire them. Afterwards, Adam and his team went back to the drawing board and designed a program where they will teach you the needed skills for a year, completely free and you’ll pay them a percentage of your salary once you get a job and you're making over fifty thousand dollars. Their program is a year long, it’s full time and because they realize that not everyone can afford to not work for a year, the program is meant to accommodate a 20-hour a week part time job as well.

Nick Caldwell is the VP of Engineering at Reddit and has been in the game for over fifteen years. He has worked for impressive institutions including Microsoft and NASA. He is also heavily involved in the community, having worked as a facilitator for organizations like /dev/color. If you haven’t heard, Reddit is the fourth most traffic website in the United States, and seventh in the world. With about 320 million monthly active users, Reddit is home to several communities with 1.1 million active communities on their platform.

Bangaly Kaba shares his story on how he broke into product management from a non-traditional backgrounds in Education and Finance. Originally from the East Coast, Bangaly is now considered as one of the best PMs in the Bay Area. He previously worked at Facebook's growth team until landing his current product management role at Instagram. You probably first heard of Bangaly's name back on Episode 13 when Elaina Koros mentioned his name on the show referring to him as a great mentor. From working in Switzerland, to starting a men's fashion business, working at Facebook and finally handling product management at Instagram, Bangaly sure has crafted his own success story.

Rocio Lopez came to the U.S. as an undocumented minor and lived on the East Side of Palo Alto. For years, she and her family have gone through so much struggle until the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA was signed by President Obama, a program granting temporary work permits to immigrants who came to the U.S. as children illegally. Recently, DACA, has been repealed by the Trump administration. And Rocio is one of the 800,000 DREAMers that are going to be affected by this decision. The average DACA recipient is 26 years old who came to the U.S. at 6 years. 91% are employed, and 100% have no criminal record. They pay $500 to renew every two years and contribute $800 M per year to the government. Rocio is a Product Designer and an amazing speaker. She considers herself an American who is willing to die for her country. But why is America trying to persecute her along with other hundreds of thousands of DREAMers? Now is the time for you to show you care. We hope for you to bring two takeaways from this episode: 1. Meet other DREAMers. 2. Make sure you call your members of Congress to pass the DREAM Act over the next six months.

A Missouri-native, Zac Otero is a true testament that a four-year degree isn’t always an indicator of success. High school dropout, Zac Otero describes how he worked his way up the career ladder from working a blue-collared job working at a McDonalds, a popcorn factory, a grocery warehouse and a meat packing factory before landing a Salesforce admin role. He talks about how he got into this role, what Salesforce is, and how he learned through books before the online platform Trailhead came out. As a Salesforce admin, Zac clarifies that he is certified to work with Salesforce but he's not an employee of the company. He works for a public accounting and advising services firm, BKD CPA’s & Advisors.

From New York to San Diego, Saron has launched one of the biggest coding podcasts called CodeNewbie. The show has over 1.4 million downloads and listened to over a hundred countries. With a Twitter community of over 27,000 people, Saron hosts the #CodeNewbie Twitter Chat happening every Wed @9PM EST. She organizes meetups in ATL, Philly, New York, and DC. She caters to an early audience to get people to recognize that there are multiple ways to learn how to code. Saron is also the producer of Codeland Conference, an annual event that gives a whole new light to how tech conferences should be done.

Born in Atlanta, Mandy Cole is the founder of The Cole Method, a consulting firm that helps startups that have reached $1 million revenue to start learning how to go from putting balls in the basket to playing basketball. It's very important for someone that successfully broke into a startup to understand what a high functioning sales organization looks like. Listen in to find out how a high-functioning sales organization is supposed to operate. Mandy is an expert at not just building organizations but explaining how that looks like and establishing the necessary processes in place. Among Mandy’s career portfolio include companies like Main Street Hub, Zenefits, Stella & Dot, and LivingSocial where she has served as VP of Sales.

Gabe Moncayo is the CEO and Founder of AlwaysHired, a three-week teaching program focused on training sales development representatives. A Bay Area-native, Gabe grew up in a family with roots to South American. He never went to college and instead got his first job in political fundraising. Gabe transitioned over from nonprofit to for-profit orgs where he did lead generation and worked at several startups. He was so passionate about the skill that he wanted to focus on teaching other people from nontraditional backgrounds about how to break into tech via the sales route.

Matt Tran is the Founder of Engineered Truth, a YouTube channel with over 240,000 subscribers. He initially followed the traditional path, studying Psychology and Mechanical Engineering in college. He had three jobs as a mechanical engineer but got fired from all of them until he finally started his YouTube channel where he now makes over $10,000 a month. Also, tune-in and check out how Matt did this and what are some resources you can use to help you get started if this is something you’re interested in. (Bonus: Discover how he negotiated his way to learn coding for free.)

Dr. Carol Langlois is a lifelong educator who used to run the business program at USF. She was the Dean at Mills College and founder of Higher Education Specialists. She did a dissertation in female self-esteem development that led her to creating a book called Girl Talk where she interviewed over 200 high school women on the subject. It was later turned into a play called Girl Talk: Teen Monologue Series. It's next performance is going to be on August 24 @ Potrero Stage in SF.

#58: Tiger Shen - An 18-Year-Old Software Engineer Who Worked at Square and Braintree by Breaking Into Startups

Kelvin Lightner is a software engineer apprentice at Intuit and a graduate of Dev Bootcamp. Prior to tech, Kelvin has a double major in Legal Studies and Economics from UC Berkeley and he worked as a consultant at Deloitte. A true lover of logic, he jumped from management consulting to tech with this strong belief that the end does not justify the means. Kevin has drawn great support from #YesWeCode, an organization that helps people from underrepresented backgrounds break into the tech space.

Mike Slagh is the Founder of Shift.org, a hiring pipeline for military veterans. Back in the military, Mike was a bomb technician and since finishing his service a little over a year ago, he started Shift.org to create new pathways for veterans into various industries that didn't exist before. There will be about a million new veterans in the next five years, which means there are 20,000 military service members leaving every month. Mike’s greater purpose is to help bridge that gap between the military and the civilian world through skills translation and leveraging the power of personal connections.

An East Bay-local, Pavan Ravipati grew up in a family of tech people. He initially took Film and Media in college, landed some corporate sales roles, and worked his way up but he ultimately found his calling in tech. After taking some coding courses online, Pavan decided to join Hack Reactor and he eventually took part in the organization's Hacker in Residence Program. Currently, Pavan serves as a Solutions Engineer at GitHub, a leading open source software company.

Erica Prenga is currently an Experience Developer at Adobe. Aware that she had a different learning style, she decided to quit college after her fourth year of studying graphic design until she ultimately figured that going to a coding bootcamp was what she wanted to do and how she wanted to learn. Erica is a Dev Bootcamp graduate and in this episode, she shares how she approached her job hunt differently as well as a couple of negotiating techniques, which people wouldn’t have normally done. Erica is big on having confidence in what you’re capable of doing and understanding your value so you don’t end up selling yourself short.

With Dominican roots, Ysiad Ferreiras grew up in the Bronx where fear was not unusual thing and where hard life would be an understatement. He has made some bad decisions in his early life but he managed to pivot his way into right path doing well academically, learning how to code, and breaking into the tech space. Currently, he serves as the VP of Sales at Hustle, a text messaging platform which is now being used by major politicians and people in nonprofit and labor organizations including the teams of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Planned Parenthood, UFCW, and more. Hustle is still in the seed stage but is now experiencing tremendous growth sending over 160 million messages. Ysiad and his sales team have taken it from zero to over $5 million in booked revenue, one of the fastest growing sales trajectories in Silicon Valley history.

Kristin Parke is a hacker aka a security consultant at the NCC Group. She shares her journey into tech and how she transitioned from music to science until ultimately she becoming an engineer. In this episode, you can find out how she went from learning how to code and following that path until breaking into the security industry. She also discusses the parallels of reading music and coding and biology and hacking as well as what you can do to protect yourself from imminent cyber attacks.

From a chef to restaurateur to Math teacher to software engineer, Mannah Kallon has a pretty crazy and nontraditional background. That makes him an asset on anyone's team. He earned degrees in Psychology and Philosophy from the University of Michigan and got his Master's in Education from Fordham University. Mannah was teaching kids in Harlem when he decided to move to the West Coast and learn how to code through Dev Bootcamp. Today, Mannah’s shares a handful of insights that you too can apply to your own life whether you want to break into tech or simply want to follow your passion! You don’t want to miss this one.

A self-confessed nerd and Sailor Moon enthusiast, Jessica Uelmen built her first HTML/CSS website at 13 years old and got involved with theater during college until she ultimately decided to major in electrical engineering during Sophomore year. She ended up working as an electrical engineer for a few years after finishing school until she decided to pursue her passion for education and worked as a program manager at Udacity, an education company that offers free online classes where she specifically managed the company’s Nanodegree programs. She then took a leap into the product management space and attended Product School. Currently, Jessica serves as a Product Manager at Fitbit.

Based in San Francisco, Hackbright Academy is focused on teaching women how to code. We're recording several interviews with Hackbright graduates including our guest today, Chloe Condon. Growing up in a family of artists in the Bay Area, Chloe ended up working at startups by day and performing as a theater actress by night. Prior to her current role as a Developer Evangelist at Codefresh, Chloe held a number of jobs including an Account Executive at Yelp and an office manager role at another startup. In one of her previous jobs working as an Executive Assistant to the CEO of NewCo, she attended an event that changed her life and put her on a trajectory to study software engineering through Hackbright Academy.

Wayne Neale is the Co-Founder of GrowthX Academy, a 12-week, onsite, immersive, full-time educational experience program focusing on careers in Sales, Growth Marketing, and UX Design. The academy was born out of the need for more non-technical roles in the tech space. Prior to this, Wayne was an operator at several companies. He started his own design consultancy and got several degrees including a Doctorate in UX Design. Originally from Ohio, Wayne currently lives in Phoenix and today, he shares with us his insightful perspectives on the current state of alternative educational programs as well as how you can break into nontechnical roles at startups.

Niv Dror currently runs social at Product Hunt and does their daily newsletter featuring the latest and coolest products. Prior to tech, Niv shifted from soccer to academics, majored in Finance, and worked for some of top hedge funds and VC firms. It wasn’t until witnessing the power of Twitter and getting inspired by the investor Chris Sacca, did Niv decide to get off the finance path and break into tech. In this episode, Niv talks about how he leveraged blog posts to meet the Who's Who of Silicon Valley, how to craft powerful cold emails, and a brief walk-through of his journey into tech, guided by his north star of offering value without expecting anything in return.

Kenny Tran is a passionate writer and coder. He chose to forego college and instead pursued his personal projects and his love of writing. After reading a post on Hacker News about App Academy, he decided to apply and learn how to code, joining the first Ruby on Rails cohort. He also attended Hack Reactor and built a cool project, PurifyCSS, that went viral on GitHub and Hacker News. He eventually joined Mesosphere, an infrastructure startup, serving as a front end engineer but is soon leaving this job in order to focus more on his upcoming personal projects. In this episode, Kenny talks more about his bootcamp journey, his job search experience, the life lessons he learned along the way, and the awesome projects he created.

Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano is best known for his hustle. Since early years, he's been coming up with business ideas and today he invests in companies and helps them grow. Before he became a Venture Capitalist, Pomp served as a Sergeant in the US Army, founded and exited 2 companies and then broke into Facebook as a Product Manager. On this episode, Pomp drops a lot of gems on how he helps companies grow and what he did to get his job at Facebook.

UK-born Soroush Mehraein moved to the United States and graduated from UC Berkeley. He studies Industrial Engineering and ended up doing consulting for biopharma companies, Soroush attended a coding bootcamp and transitioned into the software engineering roles top Silicon Valley tech companies. Prior to Google where he’s currently working as a software engineer, Soroush attended Hack Reactor to hone his coding skills and ended up landing a job at Uber. On the episode, Soroush discussed the interview process and what it was like working on the engineering team at Uber. While on the job, Soroush applied and got accepted into CodePath, a mobile training bootcamp for existing software engineers. Living by Winston Churchill’s quote, “If you’re going through hell, keep going,” Soroush believes that putting your heart and soul into building the right kind of relationships along with developing an in-demand skill set can surely take you places.

Based in Boston, Dan Pickett founded a program called Launch Academy built around the premise of helping people become the best version of themselves. Graduating over 500 people, the school is now set to expand in Philly along with some plans to create a virtual adaptation of their on-campus experience. Starting his company at 15 years old, which is indicative of his entrepreneurial, hungry, and passionate spirit, Dan encourages people to not let age become a barrier if you’re interested in entrepreneurship. This episode explodes with nuggets of wisdom from Dan as he talks about the different keys to success, not just about searching for a job, but also on the power of maintaining your personal psychology.

Growing up in Taiwan for 17 years, Kimberly Han moved to Seattle to go to College where she majored in Psychology while minoring in Dance. For majority of her adult life she was a professional tango dancer and a teacher as well as a voice actress for eight years. Until one day she realized she wanted to break into tech. Having been able to successfully translate her dancing and acting skill-sets in sales, Kim currently works as a Business Development Rep at Square. She is also an organizer at One Salon SF, a weekly social, cultural, intellectual gathering of a community of over 2,000 people in San Francisco.

Coming from a nontraditional background as an educator living in China for years, Quincy combined his passion for education and technology to launch Free Code Camp, an open-source community that helps people learn how to code and practice their coding skills by building projects for nonprofits. Quincy has indeed built a massive network of “campers” with close to a million developers learning how to code around the world. Free Code Camp has helped over 5,000 people find their first engineering jobs and 6,000 developers level up by getting better jobs. Being a prolific writer that he is, Quincy is also the editor of freeCodeCamp, Medium’s largest technical publication read by 100,000 people every day.

Realizing the need for a more rigorous and accelerated curriculum for software engineers, Nimit Maru founded Fullstack Academy. He also founded its sister school, the Grace Hopper Program, which is the world's first tuition-deferred coding academy for women. Prior to Fullstack Academy, Nimit and his co-founder, David Yang, graduated from Y Combinator. He also worked as a software engineer at Yahoo! and got his business degree from Wharton. Aside from seeing how the tech scene in the Bay Area and in New York differ from each other, Nimit has also seen how much coding bootcamps have gained credibility and recognition (especially among large tech companies) over the years.

From dancing to coding, Carly Robinson left her theater career in New York and Chicago to break into tech. She attended Hackbright Academy and is now working as a software engineer at Slack. Prior to coding, Carly got involved with Freedom For All, a nonprofit organization that tackles issues related to human trafficking. She continues to do so up to this day in her commitment to make a difference. Carly’s secret sauce to success is sheer mastery of the fundamentals topped with good networking. It’s all about putting in the work, having that tunnel vision, committing to it, and deciding that you’re not going to give up.

As a teen mom, Natasha Vianna had to deal with the stereotype that society has boxed her in. But she didn’t let this break her spirit. Natasha’s goal was and is to be the best version of herself. In fact, seeing how people (who are in a situation similar to her) needed all the support they could get was what led her to break into tech activism. Currently, Natasha leads the community activities at Honor and she is also the co-founder of #NoTeenShame, a movement that works towards reproductive justice.

Austin Belcak didn’t have it all figured out when he picked a Biology major in college and landed his first sales job in the medical field, both of which he didn’t actually like. However, he used them as motivation to push harder and further. By building his knowledge and networking with the right people, Austin has now landed his dream job at Microsoft. Additionally, his brewing desire of becoming an entrepreneur eventually led him to create Cultivated Culture, a platform that allows him to share his job search process with people in need of advice and resources. Austin is holding a Virtual Career Mastery Summit coming up on April 03-08, 2017, featuring ten speakers (including Ruben, Artur, and Timur) to talk about various topics from helping people get interviews at companies and making transitions, all the way to starting a side business and growing it up to six figures while working full-time. Sign up here to learn more about Virtual Career Mastery Summit and join this free event.

Everette Taylor is not just any 27-year-old. Don’t be fooled by his age. To date, Everette built four companies including GrowthHackers.com, which he co-founded with Sean Ellis, Millisense Marketing Consulting, and GrowthPub. He is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Skurt, a mobility startup delivering rental cars-on-demand. Additionally, he was recently announced as the National Brand Ambassador for the NASA Startup Initiative and has been honored as a Social Influencer of the Year by Black Enterprise. This Southside Richmond, Virginia-native, shares an extremely inspiring story of how he was able to achieve all of these accomplishments despite being homeless at young age. Now he travels the world speaking at various conferences while building and empowering his team at Skurt.

For Michael Jay Walker, his career was more likely driven by the motivation to do what people thought he couldn't do, fearlessly working his way up the marketing ladder until a decision to take a passionate leap into the tech space. Michael got his MBA at Ross School of Business and took on executive marketing roles for large corporations such as Ford Motor Company, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, EA, and Mattel. 25 years later, he went out to co-found a mobile app startup and served as a Chief Marketing Officer and Operations Officer at a few other tech companies. He then decided to learn how to code at Dev Bootcamp until he was later asked to join the team as a Chief Academic Officer and Campus Director in San Francisco.

Being a 3rd generation San Franciscan who grew up in public housing, Stevon has always been aware of the challenges of his community including the major lack of access to Computer Science education among kids in the Bay Area. His drive to take part in bridging this tech divide was what got him to join Mission Bit, where he now serves as the CEO. Stevon also ran and won the election to be the Commissioner on the Board of Education for the City of San Francisco. By leveraging relationships and tapping into the power of asking, Stevon is committed to providing computer science education for kids in the Bay Area so they can truly unlock their full potential.

It is his love of tech that got Carlos González de Villaumbrosia to immigrate from Spain to the United States. Being good at numbers and video games, led him to study computer science at one of the top universities in Spain where he spent five years learning how to code. Although he once dreamed of becoming a soccer player as a child, Carlos is a coach, not on the playing field, but rather in the educational space. He is a serial entrepreneur having started three companies including Product School that teaches product management to people who have the passion to do it.

One thing Kenyatta Leal knows is that while there’s no manual for surviving a life sentence, tapping into the power of visualization can definitely get you far (in fact, as far as getting out of prison and now working as a Manager of Campus Services at RocketSpace, a tech campus for startups.) Kenyatta believes that the greatest challenges present the greatest opportunities. A former resident at San Quentin State Prison, Kenyatta owned up for the bad choices he had made in the past and corrected his course. He eventually became the founding member of The Last Mile, a startup accelerator and entrepreneurial program, where they help incarcerated individuals develop tech skills in order to prepare them for successful re-entry.

Born in China and raised in the U.S., Yan Fan knows that her coding skills are a superpower she can apply in any industry or role. Yan started out working as a commodities trader on Wall Street. Several years later, she discovered her other passion - coding. After completing a coding bootcamp, Hack Reactor, Yan became a UI engineer at a big data startup called Ayasdi. This experience led her to join forces with ReBootKAMP, a nonprofit organization in the MIddle East focused on teaching Syrian refugees and women how to code.

A New Jersey-native, Charlie Harrington believes that you can’t find luck unless you take that courage to jump off the train and put yourself out there. From New York to London, Charlie transitioned from finance to business development at a startup. As if breaking into startups via the non-technical route wasn’t enough to quench his thirst for creativity, Charlie ultimately took a deep dive into software engineering by attending a coding bootcamp called Hack Reactor. Charlie currently works at LendUp as a software engineer but it was through a chance encounter that eventually got him the job.

Rodney Urquhart grew up in a North Philly neighborhood ridden with gang violence and effects of the crack epidemic. After seeing people around him get involved with gangs and crime, he realized that staying in high school would result in getting arrested or shot. At 16, Rodney dropped out of high school and moved in with his grand mother. Being a high school dropout and having no college degree, Rodney had his fair share of companies casting doubt on his ability. But his willingness to learn and work well with others was what got him to create an impressive company portfolio including Comcast, Microsoft’s Yammer, and ThoughtWorks. He didn’t just want to survive, he wanted to thrive. Rodney currently heads the test infrastructure team at Slack. He is also part of a program called /dev/color, a non-profit organization that aims to maximize the impact of Black software engineers in the tech space.

Jotaka Eaddy is a concrete example that you can come from political and social activism, take those exact same skills, and use them everyday to help build a business that creates change. Even back as a seventh grader living in a small town in South Carolina, Jotaka was adamant about her commitment to abolish death penalty (that she even wrote this down on her high school yearbook.) Jotaka grew up as an activist and organizer who evolved into a political strategist. Currently, Jotaka serves as the Head of Government Affairs at LendUp. She never would have imagined getting into tech but social impact tech was her driving force for finally joining the bandwagon. She then realized that tech people are not just a bunch of guys in white shirts, but like policy people, they are also dreamers and people who hustle to be transformative.

A Baltimore-native, Charles Pridgen majored in International Business and Finance, but realizing that he didn’t fit into the financial field he pursued a career in sales and eventually decided to break into startups. Charles previously worked at LivingSocial and Salesforce. He is currently working at a startup called Loggly, a cloud-based log management and search platform. Charles is also an organizer of the Black Professionals Network (BPN) where he seeks to build a community that fosters diversity through the power of networking and which has now grown into a massive success and a source of inspiration among people in the Bay Area.

Influenced by a strong Nigerian culture of excellence, education and faith, Ty moved from Arizona to San Francisco in search of that ONE opportunity that would push him every single day. Currently, Ty works on the Growth and Business Development team at Omni, an on-demand storage and delivery service. Often referred to by his friends as the 10X TY, Ty is a firm advocate of the Power of One where you should find that one thing & make damn sure you do it really, really well. Ty underlines the power of humility, being genuine, and leveraging relationships to help get you to where you want to be.